Expensive. Slower uploading than much of the competition. File sharing not supported.

Bottom Line

Big on simplicity, but light on features, the MozyHome backup service doesn't offer a whole lot.

MozyHome from storage giant EMC offers a fairly simple online backup service for individuals who want to keep their documents, photos, music, and other digital property safe by keeping a redundant copy in the cloud. At $5.99 per month for a 50GB backup for one PC, it's not the most affordable option for cloud-based backup, and it trails other services in speed and features. It is, however, simple enough to be a good choice for novices.

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Many backup services focus on one area of expertise, such as SpiderOak, which emphasizes privacy. Mozy is really about simplicity. Setup is a snap. Choosing files to back up is straightforward. And restoring your files takes little more than a single click of the mouse. Regardless of those benefits, however, Mozy is several steps behind our Editors' Choices in this category, CrashPlan, SOS Online Backup, and IDrive for reasons I'll explain.

Price Plans and Supported DevicesIf you want to give Mozy a test drive before committing to a monthly fee, a free version called MozyFree gives you 2GB of space for a test drive. It's not much space, and, unfortunately, the free trial is a bit hard to find from Mozy's main website (go directly to mozy.com/free instead). On the plus side, you won't have to enter credit card info to test the waters. Paid plans start at $5.99 per month for one PC and 50GB storage, with a one-month discount for a one-year commitment. To save you from doing the math, that's $65.89 per year. The next level up costs $9.99 per month or $109.89 per year for 125GB, and you can use that space to back up up to three computers. Each additional 20GB of space costs $2 per month, and each additional computer costs $2 per month. All computers in your plan share the total storage.

When stacked up against the competition, MozyHome isn't a superb value. For a little comparison, IDrive offers 1TB with unlimited devices for $59.50 per year. An unlimited plan is $79.99 a year with SOS Online Backup, and Carbonite and CrashPlan offer unlimited space plan for one PC for $59.99 per year. Mozy is, however, a better value than Norton Online backup (at $50 for 25GB).

MozyHome works on Windows and Mac computers, and there are mobile apps for iOS and Android. Mozy supports 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, 7, 8.1, and 10. For Apple users, Mozy works on Mac OS X 10.5 and later. Linux users will have to step up to the MozyPro service (starting at $9.99 per month for 10GB of storage) if they want to take advantage of the online backup service.

Getting Started To get started with MozyHome, you can download a simple program for free from the website and install it in a couple of clicks. You'll need to create an account with an email address and password. Aside from that one step, Mozy gets you started backing up your computer right away.

A simple interface (shown above) preselects content for you to back up, though you can change the selections if you want. You can very clearly see your limit (100GB in our case), as well as how much data your current selections will take up. Options for more advanced users come later. The message is clear: Mozy wants you to get to backing up your files ASAP, without jumping through a ton of hoops. For anyone backing up a computer for the first time, that's probably fine.

If you're more experienced, however, you might flinch at how quickly MozyHome wants to pull your files into its cloud, preferring instead to have finer control over what's being backed up from the outset. There is an option to go into more advanced settings to change the initial backup set, but it's not on the first screen. You have to hit Next before the option appears.

Once you make your selections and hit OK, Mozy will start backing up your files. The app estimates how long the first backup will take, so you'll know to leave your computer up and running for a while—depending on how much data you have, it could be days or weeks, and a pop-up in your task bar will remind you of that fact. Taking hours or even days is typical for first-time backups. In our testing, however, Mozy was one of the slower services we tried—more on that in a bit.

As to the safety, security, and privacy of your backed-up data, Mozy says it encrypts each file before it's sent for backing up, during transit (over an SSL connection), and at rest in the company's data centers. The company gives you a choice to use a 256-bit AES key for your own personal encryption key (the default) or use a corporate key (c-key), which is known only by you. It's an option you'll see when you first install the Mozy software, though it isn't the default. SpiderOak, which is known for its security, always gives you the key, which means only you can know the content of your files. The downside to holding your own key is the hosting company can never help you reset your password if you forget it. SpiderOak takes a few additional steps to keep your data private in ways that MozyHome doesn't. For example, SpiderOak warns you when you log in via the Web or a mobile device that those methods are not as secure as using the desktop client.

Once your very first backup is complete, Mozy continues to back up your documents, emails, pictures, and so forth, continuously, though you can adjust the backup schedule to run however often you like. During routine backups, Mozy reduces how much it taxes your machine by automatically detecting new and changed files, and only backing up what's different. Most online backup and file-syncing services work this way. But MozyHome offers some neat options to create rules that let you be very specific about what kinds of files are backed up automatically. For example, you could set a rule to back up all Word documents on your computer, but exclude documents in a certain folder. Or you could set a rule to backup all .JPEG and .TIF images, but exclude .GIFs.

Interface and Options MozyHome hides its interface unless you choose to open it. When you do, a host of deeper options appears for customizing the backup schedule, changing the data sets to back up, putting a throttle on Mozy during certain times of day to limit how much bandwidth it uses (an option we particularly like), and so forth.

One of MozyHome's special features is called Mozy 2xProtect, which lets you schedule backups to a connected device, in case you want to run routine backups to, say, an external hard drive. This feature is only in the Windows app and not available for Macs (though Mac users can use Time Machine to the same effect). The interface doesn't show you anything active, such as the active status of backups in progress or the health of your network, which SpiderOak shows (letting you point a finger at your ISP for slow backups).

If you right-click on any file on your computer, you see a Mozy option to add it to your backup. What you won't see, however, are options for sharing that file. MozyHome doesn't have any integrated features for sharing, though the company says outright it is not a file-sharing program.

Mozy offers a free syncing service, called Mozy Sync, which any MozyHome user can tack onto their account. You have to download a second app to get it, but once it's installed, you get a Mozy Sync folder on your computer that works like the Dropbox folder in that popular file-syncing program. Anything you put into that folder automatically appears on any other device with the same folder installed. Plus, you can see your synced files from a central Web dashboard that's shared with your MozyHome backup account.

Performance Mozy has improved its backup speed since our last review; it now places respectably in the middle of the pack. But it's still well behind speed leader SOS Online Backup. Speed could factor into your choice of service if you have a lot of data to upload, since the differences among services would be multiplied as the amount of data increases. On the other hand, you may not consider backup speed all that important, since it happens in the background and you only really care that the files make it to the cloud within a week or so.

For performance and bandwidth testing, we tested Mozy's backup processing and uploading speed by backing up two 100MB sets of files of mixed content types and sizes and timing how long it took to complete and taking the average. We tested on an HP Spectre x360 13t laptop running Windows 10. PCMag's superfast 170Mbps (upload speed) corporate Internet connection ensured that bandwidth wouldn't be the limiting speed factor. You can see how the whole set of online backup providers tested in the table below.

Web Client Say you need to get at your files when you're working on a computer that isn't your own. Mozy lets you log into your account on the Web to access your files. From the Web client, you can navigate around whichever machines you have backed up and download whatever you need. I love that when you choose a system (by, for example, checking the box next to Jill Duffy's iMac) Mozy shows you a single button that says Restore All Files. It's clear and prominently placed.

You can't upload files to your backup sets, but you can upload them to the Synced area of your Web account, which appears in the upper left just above a list of devices you have backed up.

Mozy's Web client does a good job of making multiple file versions available. When a file has multiple versions, you see an icon of stacked, fanned pages. Hover over it, and you see immediately that it indicates you have multiple versions of the file in question. Click it, and the various versions appear. Select any one, and you see a preview on the far right with details regarding the file type, size, creation date, modification date, and—when applicable—a preview. Mozy keeps unlimited versions of a file for up to 30 days, but that pales when compared with SOS and IDrive's truly unlimited version saving. With Mozy, once those 30 days go by, you've lost all but the latest version.

Restoring Files MozyHome lets you restore files not only from the Web client, but also (of course) from the desktop program. In the app, the rightmost option says Restore. It provides you with a file tree view of your backed up data that you can download and replace on your computer.

From your desktop, you can right-click any file that's been saved to Mozy and select to restore the backed-up file. It's convenient, but you can't get to all the previous versions of files and restore the one you need, as you can from the website. The desktop app doesn't let you restore single historical versions of files.

Since our last review, MozyHome has added the ability to search for files in the desktop app, and there's also a search bar in the Web client. The Web client makes you drill down one level at a time to get to a file or folder, starting with C:, for example, which is kind of annoying. Restoring files is actually easiest from the Web account. The desktop client is useful more for changing the backup schedule and customizing your backup sets than anything else.

The Mobile Experience There are Mozy mobile apps for Android and iOS devices, but not for Windows Phone. These apps look more like they are geared toward business users than consumers. The interface, which is a little dated, shows icons for Recent, History, Photos, Documents, Music, and Videos. The fact that Mozy has separate sections for those last few media types makes me think the apps are used by people looking to listen to their music and show people pictures of their family or vacations, more than by those looking to get work done by accessing documents and sharing files.

There are players built in for watching videos and playing music. I like that you can click on an icon for music or videos and have all files from your backups that are those file types appear, no matter where they're nested in your folder structure. I played some .m4a files from iTunes with no problem and only a short delay over Wi-Fi to get the songs started.

As mentioned, MozyHome isn't really in the business of helping you share files. It just doesn't offer sharing as a feature. From the mobile app, you can email files, but they're delivered as attachments. There are no options for giving someone else secure or password-locked access to your files that are backed up on Mozy.

Many other backup services do include ways of sharing files securely, and I'd point you to Carbonite, IDrive, or SOS Online Backup if that's an important aspect of your backup service.

Another thing Mozy's app doesn't offer is automatic uploads for photos and videos, as many online backup services do. You can, however, upload images, files, and other data from your phone to your Mozy account on demand.

You Can Do Better Although MozyHome is simple and very easy to setup, the it doesn't offer a whole lot of features, and it's only middling as far as speed goes. Even if all you need is a backup service to keep a copy of your files safe just in case, MozyHome still is a bit more expensive than the other options available. Try Editors' Choices CrashPlan, IDrive, or SOS Online Backup instead. All three offer more bang for your buck.

EMC MozyHome

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She is also the creator and author of ProductivityReport.org.
Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for...
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Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine’s Solutions section, which covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software. Most recently he covered services and software for ExtremeTech.com.
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